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Artifact Details

Title

Smith patent notebook (#714)

Catalog Number

102723041

Type

Text

Date

1967-04-25-1969-06-07

Author

Smith, William R.

Biographical Notes

William R. Smith (Ph.D.) joined Fairchild circa mid-1963 from the Electrical Engineering Department, Engineering Experiment Station at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where he performed research into tunnel diode logic circuits. A 1966 R&D Lab organization chart identifies him as a member of Technical Staff in the Digital Systems Research Dept reporting to Rex Rice where he was a principal contributor to the architecture for the SYMBOL IIR high-level time-sharing computer system. SYMBOL eliminated extensive machine instructions with hundreds of commands and replaced them with a simpler set of instructions composed in English. This made programming the Symbol IIR fast, simple and efficient. One system was shipped to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University in 1970.

Publisher

Fairchild Semiconductor

Identifying Numbers

Document number

714

Extent

See Abstract. 79 pages used.

Dimensions

12 x 10 inches

Description

This volume (pp.1–76) continues the 100-plus page document titled “General System Configuration” comprising block diagrams and functional descriptions of the machine included in Smith (470). Note the dates on the pages record when they were pasted into the book (1967-04-25) not the date of the invention. These were in mostly in 1966-10 and 1966-11. Also disclosure of “Paging Algorithm” (pp. 77-79).

Patents

The author is named as inventor on 4 U.S patents, including 4 patents assigned to Fairchild: